Not long ago, the fate of governments in South Asia was decided in the barracks. Generals whispered in midnight meetings, tanks rumbled into capitals by dawn, and radio stations announced “new orders” with military precision.
From Islamabad to Dhaka, it was a grimly familiar theater: coups carried out under the watchful gaze of Washington or Moscow, each side installing pliant allies in the great Cold War chess game.
That age of overt coups has ended. In its place, a subtler model has emerged—one that does not march, but trends. Regime change is now live-streamed, hashtagged, and algorithmically amplified. Smartphone-wielding protesters, often middle-class youth, become the vanguard.
Their fury is magnified by platforms designed to reward spectacle over substance. Armies, once the protagonists, now linger in the wings, stepping in only when popular momentum has made resistance impossible.
Foreign powers no longer ship weapons to generals; instead, they bankroll NGOs, amplify activists and subsidize influencers who can seed narratives at viral speed.
This is the “social media coup”: cleaner, less obviously authoritarian, and superficially democratic. Yet beneath the surface, it can be even more corrosive than the crude coups of old.
Across South Asia—Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan—governments have fallen or teetered under the weight of digital mobilization. Even India, the region’s elephant, cannot entirely ignore the tremors.
The question now is not whether South Asia is vulnerable to externally nudged upheaval, but whether these digitally engineered revolts leave anything behind but chaos.
Dynasty to meme in Sri Lanka
The collapse of Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa dynasty in 2022 marked the first tremor of this new order.
As the economy imploded, fuel lines snaked through Colombo and daily life ground to a halt. The Aragalaya (“struggle”) movement began among middle-class youth, but within months it swelled into a mass revolt.
Social media provided acceleration. Images of protesters lounging in Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidential pool went viral across the globe, turning a national crisis into a meme-driven morality play. The symbolism was devastating: a once-untouchable dynasty reduced to an internet punchline.
The military, rather than crushing the protests, chose restraint. It cast itself as guardian of public order, gently easing the Rajapaksas aside. By 2024, elections swept in Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his National People’s Power coalition. Abroad, this was hailed as people’s power.
But beneath the optics, the state remains bankrupt, dependent on creditors and austerity. Hashtags toppled the dynasty, but they did not solve Sri Lanka’s fiscal collapse.
Revolution in limbo in Bangladesh
In August 2024, Bangladesh followed.
What began as student protests over civil service quotas quickly widened into a revolt against Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian grip. Dhaka’s streets were filled with fiery speeches and viral images of police brutality.
As the unrest spread, Hasina fled. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus stepped forward as the face of an interim government, burnished by his global reputation. Social media cast the transition as a morality tale: noble students and a benevolent reformer vanquishing a strongwoman.
But reality is less tidy. A year on, the interim government is paralysed. Factories have closed, unemployment is soaring, and GDP growth has plummeted to its lowest in four decades.
Student leaders squabble with technocrats. Returning parties—some pushing Islamist agendas—compete for influence, raising fears of creeping religious conservatism.
Internationally, Bangladesh’s upheaval was reduced to viral imagery: flags, speeches, exiles. What was lost was the deeper story—of an economy vulnerable to instability, and of a nation straying from the secular, democratic ethos forged in its 1971 liberation war after one of history’s bloodiest genocides.
Social media simplified the narrative, but it cannot repair the fabric of governance.
Hashtags and havoc in Nepal
Nepal’s turn came when its government banned 26 social media platforms in a bid to muzzle dissent. The ban backfired spectacularly. Youth anger erupted on the streets, and “#NepoKids”—a mocking label for the political elite’s children—trended relentlessly.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned amid escalating protests. The army imposed curfews and restored order, but again positioned itself as stabilizer, not instigator. Nineteen people died, yet the rupture was clear: a generation alienated from an ossified political class.
The demands of protesters revealed another danger. Beyond anger at corruption and censorship, calls emerged to restore the monarchy and return Nepal to a Hindu state. What began as a digital revolt against nepotism now risks reshaping the country’s secular democratic order.
Waiting game in Pakistan
In Pakistan, the script has not yet played out in full. The military still dominates politics, manipulating parties with heavy-handed control. Yet unrest simmers.
Restrictions on Imran Khan’s party, recurring Baloch protests, and the establishment of a new paramilitary force suggest the government fears contagion from its neighbors.
For now, the generals remain in charge. But Pakistan’s vast youth population, digitally connected and emboldened by regional examples, may eventually test the limits of repression.
When that spark comes, the military may once again step back—allowing “the people” to topple a government before reasserting its role as ultimate arbiter.
An elephant in waiting in India
The great question is whether India could face a similar reckoning. Its institutions, though flawed, are sturdier than those of its neighbors.
Its economy is stronger, providing more opportunity to its restless youth. India’s long-standing ties with Russia and China also insulate it from the external engineering seen elsewhere.
Yet insulation is not immunity. India’s staggering inequality, high youth unemployment, and entrenched elite privilege mirror conditions in its neighbors.
Its social media ecosystem is vast—fertile ground for digitally coordinated unrest. Were a crisis to ignite, the sheer scale could dwarf anything South Asia has seen.
The global playbook
The pattern across South Asia mirrors a global script.
Where the Cold War saw coups bankrolled by superpowers arming generals, today’s regime changes are subtler. Activists and NGOs receive funding; influencers are amplified; armies intervene late, ensuring uprisings appear civilian-led.
Social media giants—YouTube, Facebook, X—are the new battlegrounds. Far from neutral platforms, their algorithms privilege outrage and spectacle. In South Asia, grievances are distilled into memes and hashtags.
Protest leaders morph into influencers, rewarded not for building institutions but for accumulating followers. Revolutions become viral commodities.
Foreign actors exploit this dynamic with remarkable efficiency. By funding content creators and narrative networks, they shape public opinion at low cost and high impact.
For many young South Asians, content creation itself becomes a livelihood, subsidized by donors or hidden patrons. Protest thus becomes both spectacle and profession.
Revolts as consumer products
Here lies the paradox. Capitalism, once heralded as the path to prosperity, now commodifies instability.
Revolts are marketed like consumer products, packaged with logos, hashtags, and heroic imagery. Outrage becomes a profitable resource, harvested by Silicon Valley and manipulated by geopolitical rivals. This is not democracy in any meaningful sense.
It is political engineering dressed up as people power. Young generations, poorly educated and with limited job prospects, are fed simplified narratives that ignite rage but rarely deliver solutions.
Their passion becomes raw material in the machinery of global capital. Governments collapse, yet debt, corruption and weak institutions remain.
A hashtag away
South Asia’s upheavals—from Sri Lanka’s meme revolution to Bangladesh’s fragile transition to Nepal’s hashtag uprising to Pakistan’s simmering unrest—show that coups have gone digital. India may be more resilient, but no state is immune.
The lesson for governments is clear: banning platforms may delay unrest, but ignoring youth grievances is far more dangerous. The challenge for youth movements is to translate spectacle into real reform.
And for the world, the question is as ethical as it is political. When capitalism monetizes outrage and powers outsourced regime change to activists and algorithms, instability is not a bug of the system—it is the business model.
The unsettling truth is that the next revolution may not be plotted in a barracks or debated in a parliament. It may be coded into an algorithm, hosted on a server thousands of kilometers away and arrive at the speed of a trending hashtag.
Mak Khan is a Bangladeshi-born Australian, a former international civil servant with the United Nations and a former academic with the University of Melbourne.
